Painting Sunlight Through Foliage with Liquitex Bio-Based Heavy Acrylics

This project shares techniques for painting a halo of warm sunlight radiating through foliage. While the project focus is on sunlight and landscape, the same technique can be used to achieve glowing light regardless of its source or your subject matter. Whether you’re painting the sun, glaring ligh...

Instructions

1. Toning the Canvas: While toning a canvas with a color is not required, it can be a nice way to eliminate the intimidation of a stark white surface. It also does some of the work for you. If any little areas of the canvas are not fully covered in subsequent layers, the toned ground fills in those gaps with sometimes unexpected and welcome results. The choice of color may relate to other colors you expect to use in the painting, or it may provide a sharp and interesting contrast like the Medium Magenta used in this project.

2. Sketching the Composition: This should be a very loose sketch that gives general placement of forms and can be done with a pencil or paint. The beauty of landscape as a reference is that forms don’t necessarily have to be exact, so you need not be too specific at this stage. However, if you feel uncertain, you may decide to draw guidelines like a grid on your reference photo and your surface to help properly place forms.

3. Block in Stage Part I: In the initial stage of painting the goal is to block in colors and cover the surface so that you can begin to make judgements on the relative relationships between color, value and temperature. Mix 1-part Brilliant Blue to 5-parts Titanium White to block in the upper right-hand corner where you see the sky which is also one of the lightest areas. Create a dark green with a mix of 1-part Phthalocyanine Blue Green Shade to 6-parts Yellow Medium Azo to begin blocking in the darkest areas of the trees in the middle to upper portions of the image. 1-part Brilliant Blue to 4-parts Yellow Medium Azo will create a mixture for the shadows of the trees on the foreground.

4. Block in Stage Part II: In this step the goal is to fill in most of the remaining areas so that you can better assess the overall mood and feeling of the image. Using 5 parts Titanium White to one-part Yellow Light Hansa, block in an approximate circle shape for the lightest area of the sun, adding a bit of Yellow Medium Azo and Cadmium Free Orange as the light radiates outward. Some of this will be obscured as more areas of the trees overlap. Next, mix four parts Phthalo Blue Green Shade with one-part Yellow Medium Azo and adjust as needed with a bit of Brilliant Blue to move outward from the sun with slightly lighter areas of green. Lastly in this stage, mix three parts Yellow Light Hansa to one-part Brilliant Blue to block in the light yellow-green areas in the foreground and mix one-part Phthalo Blue Green Shade to a bit of Cadmium Free Red Light to create a warm brown violet for the tree trunks.

5. Refining the Details: This final stage is all about refining by pushing the contrast of your lights and darks and thinking about temperature changes and texture without overworking your painting. Start with one-part Brilliant Blue and slowly mix in a bit of Cadmium Free Orange and one-part Bio Based Matte Gel to add volume. This will create a very warm green that moves towards orange and can be used around the sun glare to both tighten the focus of the light source and give the feeling of light glowing through the trees. This can be applied with a brush or palette knife if you feel confident. To warm the tree areas surrounding the sun mix 1-part Phthalo Blue Green Shade to 3 parts Yellow Medium Azo and a bit of Cadmium Free Orange. You are attempting to make gradations of color that move from lighter and warmer at the light source to successively cooler and darker towards the upper edges of the trees. The same Phthalo Blue and Yellow Medium Azo mixture can be used for the band of darker foliage at the base of the trees. A very small amount of Cadmium Free Orange can be placed along the edges of the tree trunks to give the feeling of light hitting them. The lightest yellow-green areas of sunlight in the foreground can be mixed from 1-part Brilliant Blue to 4 to 5 parts Yellow Light Hansa. This can also be used for any highlights in the trees. Add Titanium White to the sky to add clouds and dimension. There is a slight band of a river in the middle of the composition that breaks up the greens of the foliage. This is painted by 1-part Brilliant Blue with a touch of Medium Magenta to create a violet tone to play off of the yellow-green foliage. Lastly, the rock in the foreground uses this same mixture; for the shadow side, mix Titanium White for the light side with the slightest amount of Cadmium Free Red Light to warm it up.